Rock, Paper, Scissors

The other day, I popped into Twitter to see what was trending.  I noticed the NRA tag was trending so I bit and took a peek.  Wow.  What a mess.  It is amazing how many really stupid people there are out there.  One tweet in particular caught my eye.  I’ll paraphrase here: 

To the NRA:  If a kid hits another kid with a rock, does that mean we should arm all kids with rocks?

I had to chuckle.  Really?  So let’s play this game out a bit: 

"If all the good kids had rocks, would the bad kids hit good kids with rocks knowing that the good kids would hit them with rocks?"

Oh – how about this one:  "If we allow good kids to carry concealed rocks, will bad kids be afraid to hit other kids with rocks?"

And maybe just a bit further:  "If you were a bad kid with a rock, where would you go to hit other kids with rocks?  A place where the kids may have rocks or a place where you know NO kids have rocks?"

And one more:  "In a world with rocks, would you rather your child go to school where an adult with rocks will protect them against bad people with rocks, or would you rather they go where the only rocks were wielded by bad people wanting to hurt them?"

See?  I LIKE this analogy!  It really helps put things into focus for me. 

Let’s try another tack:  If you send your child to Karate or Tai Kwan Do or Judo or other ‘self-defense’ classes, it’s obviously not just because of exercise.  Kids can get exercise doing a lot of other, non-violent things.  What if your kid is a jerk and uses that training in a wrong way; say to beat up other kids at school to steal their lunch money or sneakers?  The question then has to be asked:  Is the child to blame or is the martial art to blame?  To remain consistent with the anti-gun crowd, you would have to say that the child is not to blame – the martial art is to blame.  We should then ban all dojos and fight training of any kind, regardless of the reason.

Many times the argument about guns is that since nobody with a legal carry permit prevented the crime, that obviously guns are not the solution.  The thinking is that since it wasn’t stopped, that it couldn’t be stopped, and therefore guns can’t be part of the solution.  The other argument I hear is that the legally armed citizen could wind up killing or injuring other innocent folks if he/she gets into a gun battle with the crazy.  History seems to tell us something different.  There are many times when a citizen has stopped a rampage by simply pointing their firearm at the nut job.  Even if the wacko intends to kill himself, it seems that they don’t want to take the chance that the other person might make a mess of it and leave them suffering and alive.

The first example that springs instantly to my mind is the Pearl High School shooting in Pearl, Mississippi.  One of the main reasons that this one sticks out for me is that Pearl High School is where I went to school.  You may remember the story - a 16 year old student slit his mother’s throat, then went to school with a .30-30 rifle (not an ‘assault rifle’ or AR-15 – a hunting rifle) and started shooting folks.  The assistant principle, Joel Myrick, ran to his truck to retrieve his .45 caliber pistol.  He then chased the student down and held him at bay by pointing the pistol at him.  He then forced the kid down on the ground and held him down by putting his foot on the kid’s neck.  Two female students and the shooters mother were the only deaths.  Seven others were wounded.  But because of his actions, which did NOT include any shots fired, nobody else was killed and the shooter was arrested.

The shooter had planned to kill a bunch of kids at the High School, then go to the Junior High and do the same thing, but an armed citizen stopped the rampage.  Basically, the good-guy with the rock stopped the bad-guy with a rock, and a lot of good-guys are alive today because of that. 

An interesting aside is that the hero, Assistant Principle Joel Myrick was treated awfully and was roundly criticized by gun control advocates for pointing his gun at a student (it doesn’t seem to matter that the student was killing folks) and for holding this nut-job down with his foot on the kid’s neck.

Another example of this is Nick Meli.  He is the gentleman who, in December at the Oregon Clackamas Town Center mall shooting, brandished his weapon at the shooter and likely ended the rampage.  What?  You didn’t hear about that?  Huh.  I wonder why?  Anyway, the official report says that the shooter likely stopped shooting other people and shot himself when his gun jammed. 

Now, I don’t know everything about everything, but normally when guns jam, they don’t do it in a way that allows you to shoot yourself and not others.  As reported by KGW, a local television station in Portland, Oregon, a citizen with a concealed weapon’s permit, Nick Meli, drew his firearm and pointed it at the shooter, Jacob Roberts, but held his fire for fear of hitting other innocents.  The shooter was having problems with his rifle and saw Meli, and it appears that when he cleared the gun, rather than shoot other folks in the mall, he decided to shoot himself. 

Obviously, we won’t ever truly know what led him to shoot himself instead of continuing with his rampage – However, it seems odd to me that he went to the mall to kill lots of folks, was heavily armed with multiple magazines so he could accomplish that task, and after shooting only three people, has gun problems, cleared those problems and then decided to shoot himself instead of continuing what he came there to do.  I tend to believe that he thought it likely that if someone else started shooting at him, he might be injured and taken alive, so he killed himself to make sure it was done right with the least amount of pain on his part.  It’s also possible that he may have intended to kill himself when the police arrived, and may have mistaken Meli for an officer.  We’ll never really know.

What we do know is that a citizen with a firearm was present, and contrary to everything the left wants us to believe, there was no bloodbath caused by the law-abiding citizen.  In fact, this seems to be another case of a major bloodbath being prevented by the ‘rock’ carried in the hands of a citizen who hopes sincerely with all his heart, that he never has to ‘throw’ it.